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Thanks for the feedback! Yes, I do notice there are quite a few lighter images on Unsplash nowadays, so the white text will be hidden on those. Will add the s

Thanks for the feedback! Yes, I do notice there are quite a few lighter images on Unsplash nowadays, so the white text will be hidden on those. Will add the shadows to the text as you suggested to make it work better. I'll investigate those Firefox issues too - I did most of the testing in Chrome, Safari and IE, but will do some more on FF to ensure it works OK on all browsers. If traffic gets really high on our site, I may resort to locally hosted images to reduce load time. Unsplash.it may also be throttling the image load time for us, as I am thinking the sudden spike from this HN post may have alerted them to the fact that there is suddenly a flurry of remote calls to them from our server IP? Or perhaps the Amazon CloudFront CDN is causing a slow down there? I will investigate - thanks for your useful feedback.

wavefunction 10y ago
You could color-sample the pictures displayed on the fly with a library like color-thief[0] and render the text in some acceptable contrasting color. We do something similar for a bit of our app that allows the users to set color schemes. [0]http://lokeshdhakar.com/projects/color-thief/ http://lokeshdhakar.com/projects/color-thief/
- cyberferret 10y ago
  Nice library! All javascript too. Thanks for the heads up - will certainly make an interesting project to use this to calculate the text colour for the error screens. In fact, I may be able to go back to using coloured Unsplash images. I went for Grayscale images purely so that I could stick to white text for the contrast.
SOLAR_FIELDS 10y ago
Since you're worried about server load on Unsplash there is always (as I'm sure you're aware) the option to periodically ding their server and store a rotating cache of their images instead of having the user hit them per request.
- cyberferret 10y ago
  Thanks. I had heard about the possiblity of doing this, but never visited it in detail - mainly because (up until this post today), we were only serving up one or two 404/500 pages per day, but if things get really busy, then I expect I will look into that. I already use pre-downloaded Unsplash images within the app itself for the user 'lock screens'. I've curated and placed about 20 images on our server expressly for that purpose [1],[2] [1] - https://flic.kr/p/NV8cS3 https://flic.kr/p/NV8cS3 [2] - https://flic.kr/p/NN3vvY https://flic.kr/p/NN3vvY

wavefunction 10y ago

You could color-sample the pictures displayed on the fly with a library like color-thief[0] and render the text in some acceptable contrasting color. We do something similar for a bit of our app that allows the users to set color schemes. [0]http://lokeshdhakar.com/projects/color-thief/ http://lokeshdhakar.com/projects/color-thief/

cyberferret 10y ago
Nice library! All javascript too. Thanks for the heads up - will certainly make an interesting project to use this to calculate the text colour for the error screens. In fact, I may be able to go back to using coloured Unsplash images. I went for Grayscale images purely so that I could stick to white text for the contrast.

SOLAR_FIELDS 10y ago

Since you're worried about server load on Unsplash there is always (as I'm sure you're aware) the option to periodically ding their server and store a rotating cache of their images instead of having the user hit them per request.

cyberferret 10y ago
Thanks. I had heard about the possiblity of doing this, but never visited it in detail - mainly because (up until this post today), we were only serving up one or two 404/500 pages per day, but if things get really busy, then I expect I will look into that. I already use pre-downloaded Unsplash images within the app itself for the user 'lock screens'. I've curated and placed about 20 images on our server expressly for that purpose [1],[2] [1] - https://flic.kr/p/NV8cS3 https://flic.kr/p/NV8cS3 [2] - https://flic.kr/p/NN3vvY https://flic.kr/p/NN3vvY